It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences. These challenges are daunting, but we are blessed with examples from saints who’ve gone before.
Choose a Life Apart from the Crowd
I am sitting at the luncheon table of Father Kirill Kaleda inside the toasty warm wooden building that serves as his office. A late autumn snow fell outside, over the Butovo Firing Range, the field in the forested far southern reaches of Moscow where, in a fourteen-month period between 1937 and 1938, agents of the NKVD (secret police) executed about twenty-one thousand political prisoners—among them, one thousand priests and bishops. Thanks to the advocacy work of Father Kirill, the field is now a national monument to the dead. On the day I visited, Russian citizens gathered outside in the cold to solemnly read aloud the names of each murdered countryman to honor their memories and to remember what Soviet totalitarianism had done to them.
“How does an honest man live under totalitarianism?” I ask the priest, a broad-shouldered man with a thick brown beard and piercing eyes.
“With difficulty,” he says, laughing. “Of course it’s difficult, but thanks be to God, there were people who were doing their best to build their lives in such a way that they could live in truth. People understood that if that was going to be a priority to live in truth, then they were going to have to limit themselves in other ways—the progress of their careers, for example. But they made a choice, and resolved to live by it.”
Father Kirill grew up in an Orthodox Christian family with six children. None joined the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol.
“When I was a teenager, I wanted to study history,” he says. “My father explained to me that in the Soviet world, trying to be involved with history and not be involved with Soviet ideology is impossible. So I became a geologist. Lots of anti-Bolshevik families sent their kids to study the natural sciences to avoid contamination with the ideology as much as possible.”
Refusing to join the Komsomol meant that he would not be permitted to travel abroad. Once, as a student, Father Kirill was offered an exciting ship voyage from Vladivostok, on the Soviet east coast, down to Australia, Singapore, up through the Suez Canal, and back home through the Black Sea. It was a dream come true—but he would have to be a Komsomol member to take the trip. Rather than violate his conscience, Kirill declined, and proposed a Komsomol friend in his place. The sea journey changed his friend’s life.
“To this day, that friend does a lot of traveling across seas and oceans,” the priest remembers. He, by contrast, tends this garden of sacred memory, and pastors the new church built nearby in honor of the martyrs of the Soviet yoke.
Two days later, I sat in a café in the heart of Moscow listening to Yuri Sipko, a retired Baptist pastor. In his village classroom in the 1950s in Siberia, Sipko and his classmates were given a badge with a portrait of Lenin. At age eleven, the children were given the red scarf of the Young Pioneers, a kind of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for communist youth. Teachers drilled the children in the slogan of the Pioneers: “Be ready. Always be ready.”
“I didn’t wear the pin with Lenin’s face, nor did I wear the red scarf. I was a Baptist. I wasn’t going to do that,” recalls Sipko. “I was the only one in my class. They went after my teachers. They wanted to know what they were doing wrong that they had a boy in their class who wasn’t a Pioneer. They pressured the director of the school too. They were forced to pressure me to save themselves.”
To be a Baptist in Soviet Russia was to know that you were a permanent outsider. They endured it because they knew that truth was embodied in Jesus Christ, and that to live apart from him would mean living a lie. For the Baptists, to compromise with lies for the sake of a peaceful life is to bend at the knee to death.
“When I think about the past, and how our brothers were sent to prison and never returned, I’m sure that this is the kind of certainty they had,” says the old pastor. “They lost any kind of status. They were mocked and ridiculed in society. Sometimes they even lost their children. Just because they were Baptists, the state was willing to take away their kids and send them to orphanages. These believers were unable to find jobs. Their children were not able to enter universities. And still, they believed.”
The Baptists stood alone, but stand they did. If you have been discipled in a faith that takes seriously the Apostle Paul’s words that to suffer for Christ is gain and are prepared, as the Orthodox Kaleda family was, to live with reduced expectations of worldly success, it becomes easier to stand for the truth.
Reject Doublethink and Fight for Free Speech
Vladimir Grygorenko and Olga Rusanova, husband and wife, immigrated from Ukraine to the United States in the year 2000 and now live in Texas. They tell me that if you grow up in a culture of lies, as they did, you don’t know that life could be any other way.
“The general culture taught you doublethink,” says Grygorenko. “That was normal life.”
“In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school kids do,” says Rusanova. “But you never could
